Digital Watch Rant
13 Apr 2011, 04:11 PM
I have various watches whose batteries
have run down over the years. Some months ago I bought batteries
for them and then unsuccessfully attempted to open them to change
the batteries. Failing this, today I took them to a watch shop to
have the batteries replaced. One of the cases did get scuffed due
to the clamps needed to remove the back, so it wasn’t just me
that had problems opening these things. The watch expert set the
time on the analog watches, but told me that the digitals it would
be up to me to set. I thought little of this until I got home and
tried to set the time.
There are four buttons on each of the two digital watches I needed to set. Three buttons are labelled, but the labels are useless for this task because they do not label them according to the time setting mode. Clicking on buttons revealed a number of screens, warnings to “hold to start timer”, notifications that the timer had accidentally been started and so forth.
The unlabeled button is considerably harder to press. I vaguely recall years ago having to press it hard while pressing other buttons simultaneously in strange patterns. I also started to recollect decades of older people asking me to help set their digital watches and then being frustrated as I spent 20 or 30 minutes each time trying to figure out how to do so, each watch being slightly different, none being obvious and often having to give up. Hadn’t thought about that in years. Then I remembered the whole deal with setting VCR timers, which was similarly inconsistent and often completely impossible without reading a long error filled manual first which was written in badly translated language and then having to guess. Without the manual one was doomed. I also recalled telling these sorts of stories in the past and then being told by people how easy it was to set their VCR clock, with the implication being that they were brilliant geniuses having figured it out and I was obviously a moron.
Looking around in 2011, I don’t see many people with digital wristwatches. I see occasional analog ones, which are very easy to set. Most people use their cell phones as watches now, and those not only automatically set the time, but they track time zone changes automatically as you drive or fly around the country.
I know this is controversial, but I think all these user interfaces were terrible, and were essentially impossible to use. By impossible I don’t mean that it couldn’t eventually be figured out. I mean that it took far more time and trouble to figure it out than any reasonable person would tolerate for what should be a trivial task.
Googling on “how to set a digital watch” there are dozens of articles, each describing a different method specific to one type of watch. Reading through the first several articles, not one of them described a method that worked with either of these watches. This is a failure of design. Setting the time is not a conceptually complicated task. Doing so on an analog worked fine and worked the same on all watches.
Digital watches should have implemented the same interface as analog. Pull the knob out to put in time changing mode and turn it to change the hours. There are plenty of digital knob designs that have endless turning nowadays, they are common on synthesizers, and are found on mouse wheels. That interface worked fine and should not have been abandoned. The replacement of four buttons and mystery button pressing sequences is not an improvement.
This also reminds me of a car radio I once had. It took me several years before I found out that the way to set stations was to hold down station buttons for five seconds. That was not obvious at all. Once I understood it, yes, it was easy. But then the next car radio worked a different way.
Any time a designer is contemplating having buttons that do multiple things that are not labelled, or buttons that do several very different things depending on how long they are pressed they should stop and ask themselves if this is the right design. If it’s just a shortcut, and there also exist alternative methods of doing the same thing, then it’s not a problem. But if the only way to do something is extremely unobvious, unlikely to be accidentally discovered, and not labelled, it’s probably going to be a problem for many users.
Another problem is arbitrarily different interfaces. If you are going to have a new interface, it should be better than existing well known ones. For example, analog watch interfaces work fine and are well understood. There is not a single digital wrist watch I have ever seen that is any improvement whatsoever in the ease of use of the analog watch interface. Therefore, the interface should not have been changed. This is simple logic. Likewise the interface on VCRs. They should have either used analog style knobs or decoded time signals that have been encoded on TV transmission signals for years. Modern cell phones do have an improvement over analog watches though, they set the time automatically.
Designers responsible for digital watch like interfaces should do the world a favor and stop designing things. There is no excuse for such abysmal interfaces, and abysmal interfaces have been a curse upon mankind for decades. It’s not surprising people gave up on them when cell phones came out with a better design. For those of us without cell phones, the answer that is least frustrating is to have an analog watch.
And finally, I remembered that the last time I dealt with this watch in 2000 I found that it was programmed incorrectly regarding whether 2000 was a leap year and gives the wrong day of week for all dates after February 28, 2000. There were a number of developers back then who knew that there was a 100 year exception to the 4 year exception, which they gleefully programmed into their systems, not having studied the issue fully where they would have realized that there is a 400 year exception to the 100 year exception. I talked to one of these developers in 1991 who was gleefully bragging to me about how brilliant and exceptional he was for knowing about the 100 year exception. When I informed him about the 400 year exception, which meant that his exception was breaking year 2000 leap support rather than fixing it, he shrugged and said “Whatever. When 2000 comes around, I’m not going to be working there any more anyway, so it’s someone else’s problem.” That statement left a bitter taste in my mouth that remains today, 20 years later. What unimaginable hubris many incompetent designers have.
There are four buttons on each of the two digital watches I needed to set. Three buttons are labelled, but the labels are useless for this task because they do not label them according to the time setting mode. Clicking on buttons revealed a number of screens, warnings to “hold to start timer”, notifications that the timer had accidentally been started and so forth.
The unlabeled button is considerably harder to press. I vaguely recall years ago having to press it hard while pressing other buttons simultaneously in strange patterns. I also started to recollect decades of older people asking me to help set their digital watches and then being frustrated as I spent 20 or 30 minutes each time trying to figure out how to do so, each watch being slightly different, none being obvious and often having to give up. Hadn’t thought about that in years. Then I remembered the whole deal with setting VCR timers, which was similarly inconsistent and often completely impossible without reading a long error filled manual first which was written in badly translated language and then having to guess. Without the manual one was doomed. I also recalled telling these sorts of stories in the past and then being told by people how easy it was to set their VCR clock, with the implication being that they were brilliant geniuses having figured it out and I was obviously a moron.
Looking around in 2011, I don’t see many people with digital wristwatches. I see occasional analog ones, which are very easy to set. Most people use their cell phones as watches now, and those not only automatically set the time, but they track time zone changes automatically as you drive or fly around the country.
I know this is controversial, but I think all these user interfaces were terrible, and were essentially impossible to use. By impossible I don’t mean that it couldn’t eventually be figured out. I mean that it took far more time and trouble to figure it out than any reasonable person would tolerate for what should be a trivial task.
Googling on “how to set a digital watch” there are dozens of articles, each describing a different method specific to one type of watch. Reading through the first several articles, not one of them described a method that worked with either of these watches. This is a failure of design. Setting the time is not a conceptually complicated task. Doing so on an analog worked fine and worked the same on all watches.
Digital watches should have implemented the same interface as analog. Pull the knob out to put in time changing mode and turn it to change the hours. There are plenty of digital knob designs that have endless turning nowadays, they are common on synthesizers, and are found on mouse wheels. That interface worked fine and should not have been abandoned. The replacement of four buttons and mystery button pressing sequences is not an improvement.
This also reminds me of a car radio I once had. It took me several years before I found out that the way to set stations was to hold down station buttons for five seconds. That was not obvious at all. Once I understood it, yes, it was easy. But then the next car radio worked a different way.
Any time a designer is contemplating having buttons that do multiple things that are not labelled, or buttons that do several very different things depending on how long they are pressed they should stop and ask themselves if this is the right design. If it’s just a shortcut, and there also exist alternative methods of doing the same thing, then it’s not a problem. But if the only way to do something is extremely unobvious, unlikely to be accidentally discovered, and not labelled, it’s probably going to be a problem for many users.
Another problem is arbitrarily different interfaces. If you are going to have a new interface, it should be better than existing well known ones. For example, analog watch interfaces work fine and are well understood. There is not a single digital wrist watch I have ever seen that is any improvement whatsoever in the ease of use of the analog watch interface. Therefore, the interface should not have been changed. This is simple logic. Likewise the interface on VCRs. They should have either used analog style knobs or decoded time signals that have been encoded on TV transmission signals for years. Modern cell phones do have an improvement over analog watches though, they set the time automatically.
Designers responsible for digital watch like interfaces should do the world a favor and stop designing things. There is no excuse for such abysmal interfaces, and abysmal interfaces have been a curse upon mankind for decades. It’s not surprising people gave up on them when cell phones came out with a better design. For those of us without cell phones, the answer that is least frustrating is to have an analog watch.
And finally, I remembered that the last time I dealt with this watch in 2000 I found that it was programmed incorrectly regarding whether 2000 was a leap year and gives the wrong day of week for all dates after February 28, 2000. There were a number of developers back then who knew that there was a 100 year exception to the 4 year exception, which they gleefully programmed into their systems, not having studied the issue fully where they would have realized that there is a 400 year exception to the 100 year exception. I talked to one of these developers in 1991 who was gleefully bragging to me about how brilliant and exceptional he was for knowing about the 100 year exception. When I informed him about the 400 year exception, which meant that his exception was breaking year 2000 leap support rather than fixing it, he shrugged and said “Whatever. When 2000 comes around, I’m not going to be working there any more anyway, so it’s someone else’s problem.” That statement left a bitter taste in my mouth that remains today, 20 years later. What unimaginable hubris many incompetent designers have.